“... life must be municipalised, will not fail to demand that this great necessity of joy, or … the means of joy, be also supplied by their local councils.’ In 1930, an MP observed that a young person today lives in a municipal house, and he washes himself … in municipal water. He rides on a municipal tram or omnibus, and I have no doubt that before long ...”

“... portrait, albeit of a distinctively colonial character and quality. Last year, the art historian David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows ...”

“... of Karl Marx and Jesus Christ, with quite a bit of Tolstoy and Gandhi thrown in. Not using money means that they pick up food from bins: they have regular haunts, up and down the country, and they visit them when travelling around to give out leaflets. ‘We feel joy at all this free food,’ Alf said. ‘And you also feel disgusted to see all this rubbish ...”

“... England – never again could the Scots deceive themselves that the English lacked the will or the means to conquer them.’ No really equal confederation of states was possible. Recent subjection had only emphasised a fundamental and inescapable imbalance. Today England represents about 85 per cent of the United Kingdom’s population, Scotland about 9 per ...”

“... like that, hard luck. Thus in March 1977, he records himself as saying of the Lib-Lab Pact: ‘It means the Liberals will penetrate the Official Secrets Act and know what we are doing before we tell anybody else.’ So much for democratic control; so much for hostility to the Official Secrets Act. We find the same ambiguity in his relationship with the ...”

“... affairs secretary, and Bernard Ingham, her press officer, and a handful of personal familiars like David Wolfson and Tim Bell, it is hard to think of a single Cabinet politician, perhaps excepting the ever-supplicant Joseph, who did not eventually find themselves, after a period in the sun, banished into the half-light: the most recent victim of this expulsion ...”

“... that dispose one somewhat more against Tennant. Philip Hoare relates one, as told by the Hon. David Herbert, about his treatment of the actress Margaret Rutherford. He cultivated her assiduously – even, more or less, proposing marriage to her – and she fell for his charms, and then when one day she came to his house for the weekend, he quite shattered ...”

“... complain if you’re shot. The shot tomato survives. It is 1962, and Grace’s good second means postgraduate work at London – a ‘provincial’ university in pre-Robbins phraseology. Her subject is animal behaviour – the whole gamut from molluscs to rats. In her exile she pursues a love affair begun in the summer balls of her final year, her last ...”

“... class and ethnic divisions and becoming world citizens. The world community could be achieved by means of visionary institutions such as an Open Conspiracy or an Air Dictatorship, or through real and fallible ones such as the UN and the League of Nations. In 1900, however, humanity’s self-destructive tendencies were symbolised by the conflict between the ...”

“... archness when he speaks of ‘the great intellectual Western racialists such as Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson and G.W.F. Hegel’, finds racialist ‘truths’ less easy to come by. After all, as he points out, when blacks begin to produce ‘literature’, they make a revolution by that very activity. The eruption into ...”

“... and instantly recognisable’ African rhythm) to the ‘folk-songs’ of the British Isles like ‘David of the White Rock’, ‘Loch Lomond’ and ‘Oh, No, John, No!’ All represented the ‘music of basic realities, the spontaneous expression by the people for the people of elemental emotions’. Robeson’s early preference of spirituals to ...”

“... read the Lesson. But this old man is fully their match. He refuses to apply to them even though it means cutting himself off from his beloved church. I could have come here then, you think, and just seen an old man praying, seen a priest visit him on Sundays, and never realised that this still rural silence, the old man’s very immobility, those odd priestly ...”

“... wonders why ordinary men and women generally obey their rulers. It was a problem that perplexed David Hume as well. ‘Nothing is more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye,’ Hume wrote in 1758, ‘than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few ... When we enquire by what ...”

“... and easy violence: taverns and clubs seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all ...”

“... Zollverein to grip colonial sentiment. Rugby was in part, for South Africans especially, a means of adapting British cultural implantations for the creation of a distinctive and differentiating identity. The alienness of the 1906-7 Springboks was signalled by the fact that, on the field, for tactical reasons, they communicated in Afrikaans. It hardly ...”